Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> The ViXion01 is rated for 10 hours of battery life and some water resistance with an IPX3 rating. At 1.78 ounces, they are fairly lightweight, although I’d like to see how they feel after a few hours.

I appreciate the honesty in acknowledging that they didn't even spend a few hours with the glasses, but man am I sick of the low effort content on the internet today.

We're talking about a pair of $555 glasses and the author of this review straight up admits that they didn't use them for very long at all. This is about more than the weight—they're glasses! Do you get headaches after a few hours? We wouldn't know because she didn't wear them long enough to tell!

If you look at what she actually wrote, the only thing that wasn't drawn from the product description is that it wasn't hard to set up and she looked at some signage and was impressed but had a hard time with smaller text.

Is this what reviewing a product has to look like in 2024? Does anyone actually give more than 20 minutes to something before writing up a piece on it and moving on to the next thing?

Being completely fair to the article writer, it looks like this is all part of coverage for a trade show. Do folks at trade shows usually get multiple hours to personally spend with devices they write about such that we could have expected this article to have information about what it feels like to wear for hours at a time?

Nope, that's good context that I missed.

Easily missed, as far as I can tell, the only indication of this is the 'Best of IFA 2024' SVG and a small hashtag at the bottom saying 'IFA 2024'.

There are also incorrect implications it seems, that you can order this from outside Japan by quoting the price in USD rather than JPY.

I don't mind the low-depth trade show coverage, but I would expect it to be a bit more clearly signposted for anyone who doesn't understand the acronym 'IFA'.

Overall though, Gizmodo has really crashed since Gawker got acquired, and most of their writing is now minimal effort. I haven't quite got as far as unsubscribing to their RSS feed, but that's mostly through pure apathy, rather than a desire to keep seeing their drivel in my reader.

Conversely, the last blog post we wrote was 8,000+ words and took months of testing, yet the average 'read' time is under 2 minutes. I'm convinced there's a correlation between interested technical users and the blocking of analytics scripts - but if I were to naively look at the data, I'd also come to the conclusion that "lower effort" was better return on investment. I wonder if these tech journalism establishments are following their analytics and A/B testing themselves into oblivion.

It's a weird trap. With no analytics, it'd be difficult to attribute any conversions to a particular user type, so I'd wager that, if the hypothesis that lower tech users don't block ads/analytics holds up, the metrics skew that way. We can't make any realistic assertions without the data for that user group. Shrug.

It's like meat and potatoes, though. Yes you can fill a website up with low effort filler content that keeps your viewers engaged and visiting, but in the long run you also need some solid meaty stuff.

A lot of that sorta stuff moved over to youtube because it was easier to monetize. I think a hybrid of the two is the nicest (reading charts from youtube videos sucks)

I agree, I was looking for the rest of the write up, assuming I had to scroll through more ads or click through to another page or something. That was one of the least informative tech pieces I can recall reading.

Unfortunately this is what the companies that pay for content pay for, to the extent that if you do better you would get penalized either by not getting as much money or not getting published at all, and obviously she wants to make money from the effort she put into writing it. Which I'm guessing still took half a day's worth of work what with incidental stuff like sending off emails and answering editors etc. Since Gizmodo probably paid 400 dollars for this that's a pretty good rate, but how many other things did she spend time writing that didn't get bought? So - in the end - this is the quality we end up with, which ironically relates to another recent HN frontpager https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547773

Don't see a way out of it. The best one can hope for is that she writes a second piece - a week with hi-tech bifocals - and manages to sell that one too.

Just a little contet:

I buy new glasses each year. I alternate which glasses I buy every other year: every day progressives with sunglass tint, and then work/computer (bifocal, larger target area) glasses. Each of my purchases from a normal ophthalmologist stocking all the usual brands cost >$1000 before insurance discounts kick in.

$555 for wearable glasses is less than half what I'm usually investing in. And with the strength of my prescriptions, I already look dorky enough.

Have you looked into Zenni optical?

And if Zenni is too expensive, Goggles4u.

Late response, but: my head is huge. I need to try glasses on before I order them. And yes, I know about their stores in AZ. I’ve actually ordered from them in the past when I was poor(er), but it’s really hard for me to buy glasses (and shoes) from brand X, which offered a good fit last year won’t offer same fit next year. True for glasses and shoes.

Yah. My first reaction was “$555? That’s not bad compared to current glasses prices.” Especially when online retailers won’t sell certain prescriptions.

>$555 for wearable glasses is less than half what I'm usually investing in. And with the strength of my prescriptions, I already look dorky enough.

Yeah I make mine last several years, but I think the last pair I bought were $700-800 out of pocket after insurance paid for the exam and a couple of hundred towards it.

most of the effort is spent on writing and A/B testing clickbait headlines

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